Introduction

Compression is both a hindrance and an opportunity: a short story is by definition not afforded the same expansiveness as a novel, but it develops different proportions to fit the space it has. It can be more grotesque, adopt a voice which over a longer span might become unbearable, show us only a sliver of a complex world with near-unfathomable rules. Almost anything can be tolerated for a little while. What I find wonderful about short stories is their intensity, their strangeness, and for me the best stories take advantage of these possibilities. One looks up 10, 20, 30 pages later jolted out of all complacency. I’m also particularly interested in what brevity does to narrative. Perhaps unfashionably, narrative is important to me and watching it play out in miniature produces distortions and elisions which I find enjoyable, as I am forced to use my own suspicions to make sense of what I wasn’t told. All fiction makes us complicit in co-creating characters and stories in our minds through reading characters on a page, but to become complicit in creating something utterly strange in one feverish go can be delightfully disorientating. The stories below span the deep past to the space-faring future but what unites them for me is their ability to revel in the uncanny, their commitment to a unique emotional flavour, their self-assurance. If you seek them out, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

‘The Tale of Shun-Kin’ by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, translated by Howard Hibbett

This long short story has been described by some as a novella, but I love it for both for its air of cruelty and perversion, and also the paradoxical tenderness between Shun-kin, the blind shamisen player, and her devoted servant Sasuke. Shun-kin remains aloof, dedicated to her art above all else, while Sasuke is possessed by her beauty and will do anything to remain in proximity to his mistress. Tanizaki’s style in translation is poised, elegant and devastating. Both a portrait of the aesthetic priorities of the Taishō era and the timelessly dark nature of erotic obsession.

First published by Sōgensha in 1933. Translation published in Seven Japanese Tales, Vintage, 1996

‘Barroom Blessings’ by Gianni Washington

A cocktail bar meeting between two supernatural beings, one called to dispatch human souls which have lingered beyond their allotted time on Earth, another to hand out punishment on behalf of the Great Forces. Here is a chance for a psychopomp to show a little mercy, however unwise that may be in the longer term. The two old comrades banter back and forth, alternately concealing and revealing secret longings and beliefs that may see them too obliterated if they judge the other wrongly. The emotional tenor of the story is alternately soft and vicious, as giddying vistas open onto other realms, their priorities entirely alien to the human mind.

First published in Flowers from the Void, Serpent’s Tail, 2024

‘Vera’ by Auguste Villiers de L’Isle Adam, translated by Robert Baldick

The Count D’Athol’s beloved bride, Vera, dies unexpectedly in his embrace. After throwing the silver key to the mausoleum back through the locked gate, the count seals himself away in their bedroom with only one faithful servant, Raymond, to watch over him from afar. He pretends that she has not died and the force of his denial is so strong that he begins to believe that she is really with him, forcing Raymond to play along as well. Impossibly, his wish becomes true, and after a year of total enclosure Vera’s presence is strong enough for her to physically manifest in the apartment. Anyone who has known grief will understand the terrible allure of the Count’s decision and be well primed for the strong, conflicted emotions it arouses.

First published in Contes Cruels, Éditions Calmann Lévy, 1893, translated as Cruel Tales, Oxford University Press, 1985

‘Two Houses’ by Kelly Link

A story within a story, the frame tale told by astronauts on a long journey through space, arguably far more terrifying and eerie than anything back on earth. The main tale concerns an orphaned young man whose resentful relatives agree to let him live in the extravagant piece of art they purchased, a house in which a gruesome mass murder took place and its exact replica. The interjections of the sentient spaceship during the telling of the main tale raise further questions about the boundaries of human and inhuman. A dear friend of mine grew up partly in a haunted house and I think of this story all the time with reference to her early life.

First published in Get in Trouble by Kelly Link, Canongate, 2016

‘Gabriel-Ernest’ by Saki

Sly, humorous and always at least a little nasty, Saki’s work brings me endless amusement. In this story, the upper-class gentleman visiting his aunt’s country estate for the weekend refuses to take Gabriel at his word when informed both by his guest and by Gabriel himself that there’s a wild beast in the woods and the result is tragic, though conveyed with Saki’s signature vicious wit. The barely suppressed homoeroticism provoked by the naked youth strolling the grounds provides a wealth of salacious counter-readings for the story beyond a mere fable about being cautious of hungry strangers. The comment from Cunningham that “his pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model” is hard to read with a straight face, as was no doubt intended.

First published The Westminster Gazette, 1909 and collected in Reginald in Russia, Methuen & Co, 1910; also in The Complete Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 2000

‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

Perhaps one of the most haunting of Schulz’s stories, the narrator’s elderly father must go away to a mysterious Sanatorium where reality works differently. He is both dead and not, both sick and fervently active, both visitable and unrecoverable to the world. The story stretches one’s understanding of narrative logic, of time and mortality and creates an internal experience of agitation not unlike how I imagine degenerative brain diseases to feel, stirring up the overwhelming desire to escape without a clear course of return in mind. It is now also impossible not to read this story as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust, calling to mind Aharon Applebaum’s novel Badenheim 1939, another story of a health resort from which the denizens are forbidden to return home. Schulz himself was a Polish Jew who was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.

First published in Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, 1937. Published in translation in Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008

‘What (Not) to Do with Your Hands When You Are Nervous’ by Eley Williams

This story takes in Keats’s foreknowledge of his own mortality, the term ‘mortmain’ and the history of the Royal Worcester Parian vase depicting the sculptor’s wife’s hands among other related ideas. It flows forth as a series of frantic disquisitions on seemingly loosely connected things as the narrator is stuck on a Tube carriage underground, growing ever later for her job interview. What I especially enjoy about Williams’s writing is the way she often explodes narrative time, replicating the experience of a mind fizzing with ideas and subterranean connections experiencing consciousness moment by moment. There is also an enjoyably smutty undercurrent as the reader starts to realise why the queer narrator has chosen to fixate on hands in particular, even if she disguises it as serious academic enquiry.

First published in Seen from Here, ed. Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, Unstable Object, and collected in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, 4th Estate, 2024

‘The White People’ by Arthur Machen

Another tale within a tale, a heated discussion between two men about the existence of evil leads one of them to bring out an unusual artefact to prove his point. In the ‘Green Book’, a young girl recounts her supernatural education, first by her nurse and then by the strange forces which live in the nearby woods, diving deeper and deeper into obscure occult knowledge, including lost fairy languages and ‘Troy towns’, the real but mysterious English folk practice of dancing through ancient turf labyrinths. Part of the power of this story is the nostalgic longing provoked by the possibility of access to a forbidden, vanished world – though too much curiosity comes at a terrible price. Despite the antiquated style, her voice still has the power to compel and shock, as does the savage conclusion the men draw from her diary.

First published in Horlick’s Magazine, 1904, and collected in The House of Souls, 1906. Now available in The White People and Other Weird Stories, Penguin Classics, 2012

‘Drownings’ by Helen Oyeyemi

Playful, fantastical and achingly sad, ‘Drownings’ is the story of a land ruled over by a mad tyrant, who drowns so many people that they form a lake of skin and keys, still conscious and lapping away at the shores of the kingdom. Arkady is so poor he can no longer protect his family, comprised of gentle, naïve Giacomo and the clever dog Leporello – and decides to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter, whose own life has been torn apart by the tyrant’s obsession with executing his perceived rivals. Arkady has a bit part in much greater machinations, of which he and the reader are only permitted glimpses. Drownings’ offers glimmers of hope but no easy answers. Oyeyemi has that rare gift of planting wild coincidences into a story with such self-assurance that you believe her entirely.

First published in What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi, Picador, 2016

‘The Sad Tale of the Sconce’ by Camilla Grudova

Teetering between comically pathetic and genuinely heartwrenching, this story recounts the surreal picaresque existence of a seemingly inanimate object, born from the chance encounter of an octopus with the mermaid on the prow of a decommissioned ship. The sconce is stolen by USSR soldiers, sexually mistreated, sold, sold again and so on until even the author loses sight of him. He has emotions like loneliness, pain and longing for his mother but no control over his destiny. The bizarre footnotes about a boy with sardines for fingers and women finding severed fingers in sausage tins also enhance the sense that this is a world in which anything can happen to anyone regardless of whether they are believed. The tale captures with great acuity the sensation of living through history both as spectator and unwilling participant.

First published in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘Hai’ by Yan Ge

The quarrelling disciples of Confucius stage their disputes for a crowd of eager would-be adepts, using concepts from the analects to surpass and baffle one another as they vie to be recorded by the chroniclers of the school’s activities. When Zixia returns to the school from a failed coup at a regional court, holding a jar of his fellow disciple’s minced remains, chaos breaks loose. The senior Confucian leadership begin to vent their long-held grudges and the dangerous secrets they have been keeping are no longer secure. The way Yan Ge breathes life into a very remote set of concerns and transforms the disciples into real people with families and rivalries makes this a gruesome delight of historical short fiction.

First published in Elsewhere, Faber, 2024

‘The Sin Eater’ by Jane Flett

Flett reworks the British folk practice of sin eating, in which the village outcast symbolically consumes the sins of the recently departed in exchange for monetary reward, into a joyful celebration of carnality, gluttony and pleasure. In her telling, the Sin Eater is privy to all the most shameful secrets of the community they serve, while thoroughly enjoying their strange and abject status. The Sin Eaters gather together to feast, drink, fornicate and make merry in spite of the heaviness of their role. It’s both a metaphor for the act of reading and writing itself and a beautiful meditation on jealousy, friendship and the expansive possibilities of the unconventional life.

First published in Electric Literature, 2022, and available to read here